One
rarely hears of it. Few elected officials raise an eyebrow. The media
makes no mention of it. But power is slowly slipping away from our elected
representatives. In much the same way Mao Tse-tung had his Red Guards,
so the UN has its NGOs They may well be your masters of tomorrow, and
you don’t even know who or what they are.

There
are, in fact, two parallel, complimentary forces operating in the world,
working together to advance the global Sustainable Development agenda,
ultimately heading toward UN global governance. Those two forces are
the UN itself and non-governmental organizations (NGOs.)

Beginning
with the United Nations, the infrastructure pushing the Sustainable
Development agenda is a vast, international matrix. At the top of the
heap is the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). Created in
1973 by the UN General Assembly, the UNEP is the catalyst through which
the global environmental agenda is implemented. Virtually all of the
international environmental programs and policy changes that have occurred
globally in the past three decades are the result of UNEP efforts.

But
the UNEP doesn’t operate on its own. Influencing it and helping
to write policy are thousands of non- governmental organizations (NGOs).
These are private groups which seek to implement a specific political
agenda. Through the UN infrastructure, particularly through the UNEP,
they have great power.

The
phrase “non-governmental organization” came into use with
the establishment of the United Nations Organization in 1945 with provisions
in Article 71 of Chapter 10 of the United Nations Charter. The term
describes a consultative role for organizations that are neither government
nor member states of the UN.

NGOs
are not just any private group hoping to influence policy. True NGOs
are officially sanctioned by the United Nations. Such status was created
by UN Resolution #1296 in 1948, giving NGOs official “Consultative”
status to the UN. That means they can not only sit in on international
meetings, but can actively participate in creating policy, right along
side government representatives.

There
are numerous classifications of NGO’s. The two most common are
“Operational” and “Advocacy.”

Operational
NGOs are involved with designing and implementing specific projects
such as feeding the hungry or organizing relief projects. These groups
can be religious or secular. They can be community-based, national or
international. The International Red Cross falls under the category
of an operational NGO.

Advocacy
NGOs are promoting a specific political agenda. They lobby government
bodies, use the news media and organize activist-oriented events, all
designed to raise awareness and apply pressure to promote their causes
which include environmental issues, human rights, poverty, education,
children, drinking water, and population control – to name a few.

Amnesty
International is the largest human rights advocacy NGO in the world.
Organized globally, it has more than 1.8 million members, supporters
and subscribers in over 150 countries.

Today
these NGOs have power nearly equal to member nations when it comes to
writing U.N. policy. Just as civil service bureaucrats provide the infrastructure
for government operation, so to do NGOs provide such infrastructure
for the U.N. In fact, most U.N. policy is first debated and then written
by the NGOs and presented to national government officials at international
meetings for approval and ratification. It is through this process that
the individual political agendas of the NGO groups enter the international
political arena.

The
policies sometimes come in the form of international treaties or simply
as policy guidelines. Once the documents are presented to and accepted
by representatives of member states and world leaders, obscure political
agendas of private organizations suddenly become international policy,
and are then adopted as national and local laws by U.N. member states.
Through this very system, Sustainable Development has grown from a collection
of ideas and wish lists of a wide variety of private organizations to
become the most widely implemented tool in the U.N.’s quest for
global governance.

Who
are the NGOs?

The
three most powerful organizations influencing UNEP policy are three
international NGOs. They are the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the
World Resources Institute (WRI) and the International Union for Conservation
and Nature (IUCN). These three groups provide the philosophy, objectives
and methodology for the international environmental agenda through a
series of official reports and studies such as: World Conservation Strategy,
published in 1980 by all three groups; Global Biodiversity Strategy,
published in 1992; and Global Biodiversity Assessment, published in
1996.

These
groups not only influence UNEP’s agenda, they also influence a
staggering array of international and national NGOs around the world.
Jay hair, former head of the National Wildlife Federation, one of the
U.S.’s largest environmental organizations, was also the president
of the IUCN. hair later turned up as co-chairman of the Presidents Council
on Sustainable Development.

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The
WWF maintains a network of national chapters around the world, which
influence, if not dominate, NGO activities at the national level. It
is at the national level where NGOs agitate and lobby national governments
to implement the policies that the IUCN, WWF and WRI get written into
the documents that are advanced by the UNEP. In this manner, the world
grows ever closer to global governance.

Other
than treaties, how does UNEP policy become U.S. policy? Specifically,
the IUCN has an incredible mix of U.S. government agencies along with
major U.S. NGOs as members. Federal agencies include the Department
of State, Department of Interior, Department of Agriculture, Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), the National Park Service (NPS) the U.S. Forest
Service (USFS) and the Fish and Wildlife service. These agencies send
representatives to all meetings of the UNEP.

Also
attending those meetings as active members are NGO representatives.
These include activist groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund,
National Audubon Society, The Nature Conservancy, National Wildlife
Federation, Zero Population growth, Planned Parenthood, the Sierra Club,
the National Education Association, and hundreds more. These groups
all have specific political agendas they desire to become law. Through
their official contact with government agencies working side-by-side
with the UNEP, their political wish lists become official government
policy.

How
the NGO wish list becomes law how can this be, you ask? how can private
organizations control policy and share equal power to elected officials?
here’s how it works.

When
the dust settled over the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, five major documents
were forced into international policy that will change forever how national
policy is made. More importantly, the Rio Summit produced the United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). UNCED outlined
a new procedure for shaping policy. The procedure has no name, nor is
it dictatorial. It is perhaps best described as “controlled consensus”
or “affirmative acquiescence.”

Put
in simple street language, the procedure really amounts to a collection
of NGOs, bureaucrats and government officials, all working together
toward a predetermined outcome. They have met together in meetings,
written policy statements based on international agreements, which they
helped to create and now they are about to impose laws and regulations
that will have dire effects on people’s lives and national economies.
Yet, with barely a twinge of conscience they move forward with the policy,
saying nothing. No one objects. It’s understood. Everyone goes
along, because this is a barbaric procedure that insures their desired
outcome without the ugliness of bloodshed, or even debate. It is the
procedure used to advance the radical, global environmental agenda.

The
UNCED procedure utilizes four elements of power: international government
(UN); national governments; non-governmental organizations, and philanthropic
institutions.

The
NGOs are the key to the process. They create policy ideas from their
own private agendas. The policy idea is then adopted by one or more
U.N. organizations for consideration at a regional conference. Each
conference is preceded by an NGO forum designed specifically to bring
NGO activists into the debate. There they are fully briefed on the policy
and then trained to prepare papers and lobby and influence the official
delegates of the conference. In this way, the NGOs control the debate
and assure the policy is adopted.

The
ultimate goal of the conference is to produce a “Convention,”
which is a legally- drawn policy statement on specific issues. Once
the “Convention” is adopted by the delegates, it is sent
to the national governments for official ratification. Once that is
done, the new policy becomes international law.

Then
the real work begins. Compliance must be assured. Again, the NGOs come
into the picture. They are responsible for pressuring Congress to write
national laws in order to comply with the treaty. One trick used to
assure compliance is to write into the laws the concept of third-party
lawsuits.

NGOs
now regularly sue the government and private citizens to force policy.
Their legal fees and even damage awards are paid to them out of the
government treasury. Through a coordinated process, hundreds of NGOs
are at work in Congress, in every state government and in every local
community, advancing some component of the global environmental agenda.

However,
the United States Constitution’s Tenth Amendment bars the Federal
Government from writing laws that dictate local policy. To bypass this
roadblock, NGOs encourage Congress to include special grants to help
states and communities to fund the new policy, should they want to “voluntarily”
comply.

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Should
a community or state refuse to participate “voluntarily,”
local chapters of the NGOs are trained to go into action. They begin
to pressure city councils or county commissioners to accept the grants
and implement the policy. Should they meet resistance, they begin to
issue news releases telling the community their elected officials are
losing millions of dollars for the community. The pressure continues
until the grant is finally taken and the policy becomes local law.

Americans
must begin to understand that the debate over environmental issues have
very little to do with clean water and air and much more to do with
the establishment of power. NGOs are gaining it, locally elected officials
are losing it, as the structure of American government changes to accommodate
the private agendas of NGOs.

Tom
DeWeese is one of the nation’s leading advocates of individual liberty,
free enterprise, private property rights, personal privacy, back-to-basics
education and American sovereignty and independence.

A
native of Ohio, he’s been a candidate for the Ohio Legislature,
served as editor of two newspapers, and has owned several businesses since
the age of 23. In 1989 Tom led the only privately-funded election-observation
team to the Panamanian elections. In 2006 Tom was invited to Cambridge
University to debate the issue of the United Nations before the Cambridge
Union, a 200 year old debating society. Today he serves as Founder and
President of the American Policy Center and editor of The DeWeese Report

For
40 years Tom DeWeese has been a businessman, grassroots activist, writer
and publisher. As such, he has always advocated a firm belief in man’s
need to keep moving forward while protecting our Constitutionally-guaranteed
rights.